What is Link building?

Link building refers to process building up a number of good quality and relevant links to a web site.

Why is link building important?

By getting carefully targeted traffic from related sites can lead to a natural, long-term increase in page impressions, with this comes increased conversions – where users either make a purchase or making contact with the company through the web site.

The result being increased awareness, visibility and credibility of your site. As well as link popularity and PageRank.

Extra links pointing to your site also obtains wider search engine exposure and helps the website get indexed by search engines.

Link building along with on site optimisation are the two factors which are vital to a
successful SEO campaign.

Tools for measuring the back links to your site

You will want to know how well your link building campaign is going, and how many links have been successful that you have submitted to other sites, and if your content is great other people would have blogged or posted links to your site as well.

With the tools below you can measure and adapt your link building campaign to work more successfully for you. Especially if you are paying for directory listings, you may find the low traffic you are getting from one site may be a complete waste of money.

• Google Analytics
• Google Link Operator – Where you type “link: www.yourwebsitename.com” to find out the number of links Google has found that are pointing to your site
• Yahoo Site Explorer Similar to Google Operator search, uses Yahoo’s cache instead – more comprehensive

Link building principles

• More inbound links (backlinks) to a page will increase your PageRank
• Link quality is important – one link from a high quality website may be better than 100 links from low quality ones
• Sites with on-page optimisation for a particular keyphrase are favoured by SEs

Use only ‘ethical’ search engine methods

When choosing a company to link building services make sure they use ethical techniques. As any ‘black hat’ or devious methods could violate Google’s Guidelines, Yahoo Guidelines or MSN’s Guidelines for search engine optimisation practices.

Link building Mind Map

The map below shows the methods you can use to build links to your site, as well as measure the success of them.

Instructions: Click and drag the map like a Google Map. You can expand or collapse the ‘nodes’ by clicking on the + or -, and also zoom in or out with the buttons at the bottom of the map.

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